Bug Triage

Triage, the process of reviewing incoming bug tickets, gathering more
information about the situation, and verifying whether or not the report is
valid, is a critical part of the day-to-day operation of all of our projects.
Some new tickets are valuable reports of broken behavior, others are
suggestions for enhancements both large and small, and some are, in fact, not
bugs at all. Identifying which issues are which and facilitating timely
communication between the reporter and the contributors whose input is
necessary to resolve the problem are all parts of the triage process.

For a newcomer, triage is a natural way to find the pulse of a
project and see what other contributors will be thinking about on any given day
(because they're also helping with triage), as well as interacting with the
team and making yourself part of the process! It's also a good way to increase
the breadth of your exposure to a particular project; the process of
verifying bugs will encourage in-depth looks at parts of code and
functionality with which you weren't already familiar. And if you're hoping to
eventually contribute code, helping with triage is a great way to identify the
bugs that need to be fixed and observe how others go about solving similar
problems.

You can help with triage for as many or as few projects as you're interested in. The process
is relatively similar for all of them:

Figure out a way that works for you to get a steady stream of new issues.

When new issues are reported, reply politely with an appropriate response
based on the situation. You may need to ask for more information, a simplified
test case (or a test case at all), duplicate the reported behavior using a
provided test case (or reducing one further), or direct the reporter to the
right venue for their issue.

For the most part, jQuery Foundation projects keep track of bugs using GitHub
issues. All you have to do is
sign up for a GitHub account if you don't already have one. From there on
out, it's as simple as "watching" the repositories you want to help triage. New
issues and comments will make their way to your notification center and inbox,
depending on your notification settings.

You can keep up to date with new bugs as they are reported by visiting the
timeline, but we recommend
signing up to receive email notifications when new bugs are reported and
receive new comments. Most of the regular triagers use email notifications
to stay on top of things as they happen, as it tends to make it easier to
digest activity on the tracker since the last time you checked. You can set up
your email preferences on the subscriptions
tab of your Trac preferences. We
also reccomend setting up a rule in your email client to keep bug emails
relatively self-contained.